Felted Foods Part 3 – Pasta, Sauce & Garlic Bread

I brainstormed a bit and there were many options buzzing around my brain but in the end I went with pasta, tomato sauce and garlic bread. All of the felt sets that I’ve created I’ve been keeping simplistic enough that they can be used by a toddler (with supervision). I know that I could have gone into a lot more detail with many parts but I’m not putting all that work into something that my daughter is likely to destroy because she’s only one and a half years old.

When she’s a bit bigger, if she’s still loving her play kitchen I’ll be at her disposal. In fact, I can’t wait until she can tell me what she’d actually like!

I’ve written the step by step process below assuming that the reader has a very basic understanding of felting. If you do not, it consists of a great deal of stabbing. A felting needle is a sharp needle with tiny barbs that thrusts fibers of felt and wool, down into other fibers and mats them all together.

Materials Required:

Light beige felt

Red felt

Light brown wool

Yellow wool

Green wool

Felting needle(s) (I prefer 38 gauge)

Felting mat

Paper

Scissors

Pencil

The first thing that I tackled was the pasta. I chose to do bow-ties for two reasons. The first was that I did an experimental one and it came out freaking adorable, and the second is that once again, I’m designing for a toddler so as far as pasta shapes go, this one was probably the best option. All you need are little rectangles. My bow-ties are actually pretty much life sized and my paper template measures 1 x 1.5 inches. I could have made them smaller to be more in line with the scale of her kitchen but I decided against it. Feel free to do yours any size you like.

Once you’ve got all the felt pieces cut out you can start stabbing (alternatively a stitch would probably do the job nicely). I just accordion folded the piece 4 times and held it flat on the felting mat.

Then I found the center of the piece with my needle because lopsided bow-ties would have been a bit sad.

And I just felted a line down the middle as pictured. I then flipped it over and did the other side so that it was nice and tight. Once I was finished, each individual pasta held its shape nicely. I also trimmed away any extra fluff that may have been sticking out to make them tidy.

Next I moved onto the sauce. I actually didn’t use a template for this. I made a pile of pasta and cut a square out of the red felt roughly the size of the blob of sauce I wanted for the top. I then stretched the square in all directions to make it nice and floppy and free hand snipped a wobbly edge all around.

The sauce blob looked fairly plain and boring so I felted in some blobs of Parmesan cheese using yellow wool by applying a tiny tuft to the felt and stabbing it into a tight little blob.

I tried to make the pieces somewhat varied in size and sporadic(ish) looking.

I could have also probably added some green bits for the oregano an basil but I didn’t want to go too crazy.

The garlic bread followed the sauce and was the most labor intensive part of the whole set. I wanted to try something different with the garlic bread as I had already made several slices of bread for the breakfast and lunch sets so I went with an oval shape (like a slice of a baguette) and I actually used the meat template from the sandwich set for this. To make an oval template, if you don’t have something oval shaped around the house at the appropriate size, you just overlap two circles and then connect the sides.

I tried two different ways of doing the garlic bread. The first was using two sheets of beige and one sheet of brown with the idea that the brown would come up through the beige and make the bread look slightly toasted. That worked ok but when I did it using all beige it actually came out better. I also ended up using FOUR layers of felt to make the individual slabs of bread. You don’t have to do it this way but I like the differing thicknesses for various felt foods.

Once I had the four pieces of felt I put them all together and applied the felting needle everywhere to felt them together on both sides. I then got a tuft of yellow wool and felted it onto one side for the butter.

Next I applied the crust to both sides with some tufts of brown wool and then I trimmed away the extra fluff. It makes a huge difference when you trim away the extra fluff.

See what I mean? Then I decided that it didn’t look quite garlic bready enough for me so as I did with the Parmesan cheese blobs, I felted in some little tufts of green for parsley specks.

Then I was happy enough with the whole thing. I’d considered doing both sides and then I came to my senses and didn’t bother.

That’s pretty much it. The whole set has 20 pieces of pasta (I’m likely to make more) 2 pieces of sauce and 2 slabs of buttery garlic bread to make a lovely dinner for two. It also occured to me that the salad pieces for the lunch set could be used to make an cute wee side salad. I love how the pieces get more interchangeable as my ideas expand.